Mountain Climbers on a Heart Monitor
We're all seeking something. Do you know what it is?
The following is an excerpt from One with God: Finding Your Identity, Purpose, and Destiny in the God Who Speaks.
Oneness with God?
Spiritual concepts can make me feel small and remote. When the words “oneness with God” enter my ears, I can only think about how far from this I feel. “One with God? Do I ever feel that way?”
That—right there—is a trick of our culture, a trick of human thought. We’re raised in an environment that tells us feeling = truth. If you can’t feel something, then it must not be something. At best, if you can’t feel something, then it must only be an idea, not a reality. We make feelings final. Experience is a close second. But the promises of God? They become tertiary, if we’re lucky.
Make no mistake, if we think this way, we’re going to be lost. Perhaps you even feel a little lost right now. We all do at times. Let me help you be found.
We can start by drawing water from the well of John’s Gospel, starting in chapter 14.
“If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you.” (John 14:15–17)
“If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.” (John 14:23)
Here we have Jesus telling us that a loving relationship lives in us. Because we love Jesus, the Father gives us the Holy Spirit, who makes us his home. Think about that. The moment you believed in Jesus Christ, the Spirit fluttered down and said, “Ah, a new home. Let me get settled in this one.”
A party of three is eternally living in you. Right now.
But that home—your soul—isn’t vacant when the Spirit moves in. Apparently, the Father and the Son are long-term residents. A party of three is eternally living in you. Right now. Regardless of what you feel, your heart is the home of the Trinity! Even as I write these words, they are beyond me. Can they really be true? Could the all-powerful God live inside such a fragile house? Can the sun live within a grain of dust?
Well, the God who is truth, the God who cannot lie (Titus 1:2), said it. So, it must be true. Whether or not you and I feel this is secondary. Truth is the foundation upon which feelings play, like swallows in barn rafters, swooping and darting from beam to beam. Feelings are fun; we love watching the swallows in the rafters. They have an excited energy. But they play upon something else. There’s no such thing as pure feeling. Feeling always sets its hollow-boned body on the edges of wood, and that wood is either rotting (lies) or living (truth), taken from the massive root bulb of the vine-dressing God. Feelings are not and never will be a foundation. They flutter.
I’m saying all this up front because we’re so prone to thinking of feelings as foundational. They’re not. Feelings always dance upon something else. They’re barn swallows, not the barn’s framework.
So, what do we do? Let’s start by recognizing that barn swallows dip and dive. They go up and down, just as our feelings, just as our experiences. We have an inherent hatred of this reality. We don’t want to rise and fall. We want to rise and stay. We want oneness with God to feel true and invigorating all the time.
Mountain Climbers on a Heart Monitor
Another way of thinking about this is to use two images: a heart monitor and the embedded image of each one of us climbing up the peaks and valleys of that monitor like a mountaineer. Let’s start with the heart monitor. Put your hand on your chest. Keep it there for a few moments. That soft pulsing—do you know what that is? It’s the body’s electricity.[1] Like the rest of your muscles, your heart can conduct electrical pulses. It actually has a natural pacemaker that sends out electrical waves. Those waves make the heart muscles contract, first those in the upper chamber, then those in the lower (about a quarter of a second later). This happens about 50–100 times a minute, depending on who you are and what you’re doing.
When we exert ourselves, we notice ourselves.
No one thinks about this. Instead, we just function. Each week, our bodies waltz through a sequence of seconds like leaves blown through blades of grass on a fallow field. We’re only aware of our heart beat when we’re scared or excited or covered in sweat, when this four-chambered drum in our chest is thudding out our existence, pumping oxygen through tiny rivers beneath our skin. In other words, we notice our heart only in peaks and valleys—good and bad. When we exert ourselves, we notice ourselves.
Something similar happens in our spiritual lives, only we’d have to replace our heart beat with the life-giving Spirit of God, the song that’s been quietly sung ever since we gasped for air and entered a world of light and sound. God’s Spirit has put breath in our lungs and vigor in our veins (Gen. 2:7; Job 33:4), but we only notice him when trouble remains, when suffering lingers, when hope dries up.[2] Or, conversely, we notice him when we’re full of passion and mirth, when voices are singing silent night in a room with a hundred candles, when the eulogy we hear calls up phantoms of ambition and regret, when our five-year-old hugs us without our asking, just because. That’s when we notice the Spirit within our spirit. That’s when we feel our soul’s heart beating, drumming to a pace set in eternity past, directing our gaze to eternity future. As the writer of Ecclesiastes put it, God buried eternity in our hearts (Eccl. 3:11). Sometimes it’s buried deeper than we wish.
The downside to all this is simple: When we’re not exerting ourselves spiritually, we have a hard time noticing God, and the truth of our oneness with him fades into the background. Without peaks and valleys in the soul’s heart monitor, we flatline. We stop breathing. We drift into a daze. And long periods of flatlining can feel like spiritual death, or at least spiritual sleep, can’t they? That’s why oneness with God fades from our awareness. Our identity, purpose, and destiny get wrapped in haze.
And here’s an even darker downside: Most of us are used to flatlining. In fact, we’re so used to flatlining that we despise valleys. We want the highlands of spiritual vigor without the lowlands of spiritual strife. Of course, that’s impossible. Peaks can’t exist without valleys. If there are highlands, then there must be lowlands. But that doesn’t keep our hearts from attempting to jump from peak to peak, from trying to live all of life in the highlands of passion, comfort, and joy.
How are you doing with this, by the way? Are you succeeding, or are you frustrated? The answer probably changes everyday, maybe even every hour. But one thing is obvious: This isn’t sustainable. We can’t go peak-jumping through life, not without experiencing a world of frustration.
But far more important than this, the valleys and lowlands are often the places where we’re most open to spiritual growth, most attuned to the words of God, most humble to receive rebuke, most aware of the ceramic nature of spiritual life. In comfort, we’re ossified and close-fisted. In suffering, we’re wet and open-palmed. If we make peak-jumping the end-all of our spiritual lives, we’ll not just end up frustrated and discouraged; we’ll also end up immature, underdeveloped. Like unfledged birds, we’ll lack the plumage we need to take flight and grow closer to the God of light, who illuminates the deepest valleys and smiles on the highest peaks.
In comfort, we’re ossified and close-fisted. In suffering, we’re wet and open-palmed.
But if we can’t go peak-jumping, if we can’t live in the highlands, what can we do? How do we keep the fully satisfying, life-giving oneness of God central? How do we really embrace the truth that God is living inside us and is calling for our constant communion?
Oneness and Jesus Christ
The only other option is to keep moving up and down the terrain God sets before us. And, over time, we might find a way to embrace both directions. How? By finding a constant, something we can always grasp with the dry and dirty hands of hope. You can probably guess what it is. This hope-giving constant can be represented more broadly by a number—one—and more narrowly by a person—Jesus. Hope, after all, “is a person, and his name is Jesus.”[3]
In the broader sense, oneness is something Jesus talked about in his high priestly prayer. In the narrower sense, the Apostle Paul offers the clearest reference.
“I rejoiced in the Lord greatly that now at length you have revived your concern for me. You were indeed concerned for me, but you had no opportunity. Not that I am speaking of being in need, for I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me.” (Phil. 4:10–13)
Paul was a mountain climber. Like you. Like me. He scaled the lowlands of sorrow, shame, self-pity, loss, and terror—bobbing on the open ocean after shipwreck, cringing at the faces of Christians he’d persecuted, burying pride beneath the soil of mercy (then digging it up and reburrying). Paul knew the depths. But he also knew the heights. He felt the Spirit push him up the hillsides of grace and gratitude. He vibrated his vocal cords in joy even behind the bars of a prison cell. He saw God’s purpose for his life like a ray of sunshine burning through the fog. The light that once blinded him now went before him. And he found joy in it. Yes, Paul knew the heights.
But throughout all of his climbing, Paul found something else to focus on besides the terrain. He didn’t ignore the terrain. None of us can. But neither did he set his face only to the dirt and dust. He lifted his chin to look up at his savior. And in that looking, he found a constant, his still point in a turning world, his straight path through any terrain. He found contentment in Christ. And as William Barcley put it, “Contentment comes not by finding conditions suitable to us but by God’s fashioning our spirits to our conditions.”[4] Spirit-fashioning—that’s how we find contentment in Christ. (Were you hoping for a different answer?)
Spirit-fashioning—that’s how we find contentment in Christ.
Now, how does God do that fashioning? Through the Spirit, in conformity to his Son (Rom. 8:9–17, 29; Phil. 11:6; Col. 3:3–10; 2 Cor. 3:18). Our ultimate contentment, then, is in God himself, especially in the person of Jesus Christ, to whom we are joined by the Spirit and are thus one with the Father. Contentment, in this sense, is not so much a general practice as it is a particular person. Though it sounds a bit like new age wisdom, you don’t find contentment; he finds you. And then you carry him with you into the wild country of daily life (Matt. 28:20).
The more I read the Bible, the more obvious it becomes that Paul pocketed his Lord. He brought him everywhere—up to every summit and down to every depression. His contentment was found in an ever-present person. And because that person never leaves us, contentment doesn’t either. At least, it doesn’t have to. Just look at the atrocities Paul suffered in his life: stoning, shipwreck, ridicule, death threats. And he says, “I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content.” That, my friends, is the fruit of a hundred seasons of hardship. That’s the conclusion of a real mountain climber.
Spiritually speaking, if flatlining isn’t an option, and if we can’t go peak-jumping through life, then we’re bound to be mountain climbers just as Paul was. And that means we need to learn the hard lesson of embracing both directions of spirituality: the descent of struggle and strife along with the ascent of hope and glory. We need both to make a whole heartbeat show up on the monitor.
Our life isn’t so much about where we’re going as it is about with whom and to whom we’re going.
But, as Paul did, we’re also bound to find contentment in Christ, to carry him with us down every dusty road of the ordinary, right on through the gates of eternity. Where we go, Christ goes. Where Christ goes, we go. A person is our path. A person is our destination. A person is our ever-present guide. Our life isn’t so much about where we’re going as it is about with whom and to whom we’re going.
You and I, we’re mountain climbers on heart monitors. That’s life on this side of paradise. But oneness with God is the good news that our heart monitors can stay grounded on something. Our hearts can beat strongly on Christ. Oneness with God is the good news that our path through tough terrain is already cut. Christ cut it. And in him we’re one with the God who knows the way, the God who is the way!
We begin where we are. Right here. On this page. Oneness is ours. We take it up together.
Read more in One with God.
NOTES
[1] “Heart Beat,” Cleveland Clinic, accessed November 4, 2019, https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/17064-heart-beat.
[2] On how we find shaping and hope in our hard things, see Pierce Taylor Hibbs, Finding Hope in Hard Things: A Positive Take on Suffering (Independently published, 2020).
[3] Paul David Tripp, Suffering: Gospel Hope When Life Doesn’t Make Sense (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2018), 208.
[4] William B. Barcley, The Secret of Contentment (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2010), 30.